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THE BRITISH ACADEMY 



Plato's Biography of Socrates 



By 



A. E. Taylor 



Fellow of the Academy 



[Frovi the Proceedings of the British Academy ^ FoL VI 11^ 



London 

Published for the British Academy 

By Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press 

Amen Corner, E.G. 

Price Two Shillings and Sixpence net. 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 

By a. E. TAYLOR 

FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY 

Read March 28, 1917 
The paper which I have the honour of laying before my colleagues 
of the Academy to-day is of the nature of a simple experiment, an 
experiment which can make no claim to represent the results of 
extraordinary research or profound speculation, but is, all the same, 
in my own opinion well worth the making. Its immediate interest is, 
no doubt, for the special student of the history of philosophic thought, 
but it should also prove in some degree attractive to every one who 
has a genuine interest in great literature, inasmuch as it aims at 
throwing some light on the literary methods of a great philosopher 
who was at the same time one of the world's greatest literary and 
dramatic artists. The question of the relation of the Socrates who 
figures as the protagonist in all the most widely known of Plato's 
prose dramas to the Socrates who was a prominent figure in the 
Athens of the last half of the fifth century B.C., is, of course, abso- 
lutely critical for the historian of Hellenic thought on the funda- 
mental issues of science, ethics, and religion. It is also a question of 
interest to the student of the history of literary forms. Even if we 
are indifferent to the whole history of the actual development of 
scientific thought, we can hardly as students of literature be equally 
indifferent to the general problem suggested by the sudden appear- 
ance in the early years of the fourth century of a wholly new type of 
prose composition, the ^(OKpariKos Xoyos or ' discourse of Socrates *. 
About the fact of the emergence of this type of composition just at 
this particular date there can be no conceivable doubt. Aristotle 
comments on the fact that the ' Socratic discourse ' is a distinct 
literary form, in the Poetics 1447 b 2, where he associates it with the 
versified ' mimes ' of Sophron and Xenarchus and complains that the 
Greek language possesses no generic name for the type, inasmuch as 
the word ' mime ' implies the use of verse, and is thus only appro- 
priate to one species of a form for which prose is, as a matter of fact, 
as suitable a medium as verse. What Aristotle took to be the dis- 
tinctive characteristics of this literary form is clear from the two 
remarks he makes about it. In the first place the recognition of the 
community of form between the ' mime ' and the ' Socratic discourse ' 
implies that, in Aristotle's opinion, the ' Socratic discourse ' is dis- 
tinguished by its * realism'. For, as we know from the ancient notices 
of the 'mimes' and can see for ourselves from Theocritus' brilliant 

VIII A 



% PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

imitation of a ' mime ' in his fifteenth Idyll, and again from the imita- 
tion of Herondas, it was just by their * realism ' that they were dis- 
tinguished from other and earlier kinds of dramatic composition. It 
is to the same purpose, as I take it, that Aristotle observes in his 
Rhetoric 1417a 19 that 'mathematical discourses'* — presumably he is 
thinking of such dialogues as that he quotes elsewhere, in which Zeno 
and Protagoras figured as discussing the difficulties about the infini- 
tesimal — do not exhibit ^^77, ' characters ', because they reveal nothing 
of the TTpoaipecrL?, the walk and conduct of the personages, whereas 
* Socratic discourses ' do exhibit tJOtj * because it is about such matters 
that the personages speak \ What this means is made clear by a 
comparison with the passages of the Poetics in which Aristotle 
explains rather more fully what he understands by TJO09, * character- 
ization ', and why, important as it is to the dramatist, it is less impor- 
tant than ' plot '. To the intending composer of a successful tragedy, 
the plot or story must be the first consideration, because the primary 
object of tragedy is to represent an action of a certain kind ; it only 
represents the persons who do the act or have it done to them because 
it cannot represent the act in any other way, or, as he also puts it, 
tragedy is not the representation of a man but ' of action and life, 
happiness and misery "* (1450 a 16 ff.; 1450 b 1 ff.). Or, as we should 
perhaps prefer to phrase it, tragedy is concerned directly with the 
tragic situation ; with the personages who appear in that situation as 
doing or suffering its concern is secondary. It has to do with them 
only in so far as their being the sort of persons they are is an indis- 
pensable factor in bringing about the tragic situation or determining 
its issue. Thus it shows us persons acting and by their action con- 
tributing to the kind of situation we call tragic. What kind of per- 
sonality they have should be shown only by what they do. But a 
man's rfOos is not fully disclosed by the way in which he bears him- 
self in some specially tragic situation. To understand it you require 
to know not only his acts but his Trpoaipecns, — his settled habit of 
will, — in a word, his personality, and this is why rjdos is only 
exhibited by ' discourses ' in which it is made clear ' what some one 
chooses or declines'.^ Thus the Gorgias or Republic, from this point 
of view, would be first and foremost a portraiture of ^Orj. Socrates, 
Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus are not exhibited to us by Plato as 
contributors to some high tragic situation, but as engaged in quiet 
and peaceful conversation, but from the course of the conversation it 
is made clear what sort of things each of them would choose or 

^ We might illustrate the point by considering how a modern novelist would 
be likely to depict such a character as Hamlet. 



PLATO'S BIOGRArHY OF SOCRATES 3 

decline, how each might be expected to bear himself towards the 
issues between which life forces us all to choose. We do not see the 
personages * in act \ but from their talk we gather what manner of 
man (noio^ tis) each of them is. If we put the two observations of 
Aristotle together we may fairly gather that in his view the ^coKpa- 
TLKo? \6yo9 — and he seems always to mean by the words just those 
specimens of the type which dwarfed all others by their superior 
merit, the dialogues of Plato — is first and foremost a highly realistic 
representation of character or personality. It is just in the fullness 
with which it reproduces or * imitates ' a character that it differs from 
drama proper, in which characterization is only valuable so far as it 
is inseparable from the adequate presentation of the tragic situation. 
And it is important to remember, what we sometimes forget, that 
the ' characters "* depicted in the ' Socratic discourse ' are almost with- 
out exception notable personages of the actual history of the half- 
century from 450 to 400, so that when Aristotle insists upon the im- 
portance of making a * character ' o/jlolov or ' like \ he must be taken to 
mean in the case of a figure in a ' Socratic discourse ', not merely that 
it shall be true to human nature, or consistent with itself (ut sibi 
caristet as Horace says), but that it shall be like its original, faithful 
to the broad historical truth about the named and known man after 
whom it is called, just as we should reasonably expect a novelist who 
introduced Napoleon or Abraham Lincoln by name into one of his 
works to make the figure not merely possible and self-consistent but 
true to actual fact, and regard it as a defect in Thackeray that the 
James III of Esmond^ though natural enough, is wholly false to history. 
We may reasonably infer, then, that Aristotle regarded the Platonic 
account of Socrates as in all essentials a true and trustworthy repre- 
sentation of a great historical figure, just as we may infer from his 
exclusive use of Plato as a source of information about the teachino; 
of Socrates that he looked on the dialogues as a faithful account of 
the philosophical tenets of Socrates. In modern times, as we all 
know, it has been the fashion to reject both these positions and to 
hold that Plato not only fathered on Socrates a set of doctrines of 
which he knew himself to be the author, but even provided him with 
a largely fictitious biography, and invented an unreal personality for 
him. According to some theorists, things which Plato relates of 
Socrates, such as e.g. the impression made on him in early life by the 
work of Anaxagoras, really belong to the life and character of nobody 
but represent the typical development of the philosophical character ; 
according to others the central figure of the dialogues is a mere 
convenient ' mask "* under which Plato conceals at pleasure himself, 

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4 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

Antisthenes, unnamed disciples or opponents, — ^in a word any and every 
one but the person whose name is on the label attached to the *mask'. 
When we set ourselves to answer the question which party is right in 
this dispute, Aristotle and the mass of ancient readers or the moderns 
of the last century, we shall find, as Socrates found about a different 
question in the Republic, that a full and final decision requires us to 
take a long and circuitous path on which every one can hardly be 
expected to have the leisure or the special vocation to follow. But 
there is also a ' short cut ' which may lead to a probable conclusion, 
and it is by this shorter road that I propose to proceed to-day. 
Without troubling ourselves with wearisome researches into the 
history of Greek philosophic ideas and terminology, we may put the 
issue to ourselves briefly thus. Does the Platonic picture of Socrates, 
if we study it as a whole, leave the impression of being the delinea- 
tion of a ' type \ or the result of superposing several portraits of 
different men upon one another, or has it the character we should 
expect in the lifelike dramatic reproduction of a highly complex and 
individual personality ? Are we really dealing with a genre-study, in 
the style of Menander and the later comedy, or, as Aristotle seems to 
have taken for granted, with a highly realistic portrait of an indivi- 
dual ? The attempt to piece together the biographical statements 
made in the different Platonic dialogues into a continuous narrative 
ought at least to leave us in a position to give a probable answer in 
the one sense or the other. Incidentally also, it may serve to show 
how much of what is universally retained by the moderns as fact 
about Socrates has no contemporary authority for it but that of 
Plato, and ought therefore in strictness to be rejected as of doubtful 
authenticity if we are sincere with the belief that the so-called 

* Socrates of history ' and the ' Platonic ' Socrates are two and not one. 

Before I proceed to the detailed execution of the task I have set 
before me, there are perhaps two preliminary points on which a word 
or two may not unprofitably be said. We may, for one thing, ask 
what facts may fairly be taken as certainly known about Socrates on 
authority independent of the assertions of Plato or any other of the 

* Socratic men \ Under this head we may reckon, of course, any 
information derived from really ancient inscriptions, together with 
all that is fairly inferable from the caricatures of the Old Comedy, 
which go back to dates when those Socratic men whose writings have 
been preserved to us were boys or infants. Well-authenticated tradi- 
tions of the late fourth century, derived from writers like Demetrius 
of Phalerum and even Aristoxenus are similarly valuable when they 
deal with matters not mentioned by the Socratic men, provided that 



PLATO^S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 5 

vre are careful to distinguish in the case of biased witnesses, like 
Aristoxenus, between the facts to which they testify and the interpre- 
tations they put upon them. A brief survey of the information still 
derivable from these sources will show what our knowledge of 
Socrates would amount to, if we set aside as possibly untrustworthy 
what we are told on the authority of the two Socratics whose writings 
have come down to us, or of later writers like Aristotle who appear 
merely to repeat the Academic traditions. 

From inscriptional sources we learn just one fact, which would in 
any case be certain on the testimony of so good a chronologist as 
Demetrius of Phalerum. The Marmor Parium gives us the year of 
Socrates' death as a fixed date from which to reason. From Aristo- 
phanes and his rival Ameipsias, both of whom produced comedies 
in the year 423 in which Socrates played the leading part, we gather 
that at this date, when Socrates was a man of about 47 or 48 he was 
a sufficiently familiar figure to be made the object of burlesques 
intended to ' catch on ' as topical pieces, and that one notable feature 
about him was his poverty ; since this point was plainly very much 
insisted on by both poets, we may perhaps go as far as to conjecture 
with Professor Burnet that the philosopher had recently incurred 
some notorious losses. From the play of Aristophanes, the Clouds, 
we gather further that he was interested in mathematical, cosmologi- 
cal, and biological studies, and combined these interests with a kind 
of private religion which enjoined an ascetic rejection of the good 
things of this life and involved what were commonly regarded as 
fantastic notions about the soul and the unseen world. From a later 
notice in the Birds (1553 fF.) we may infer that these notions were of 
such a kind that it was within the limits of legitimate parody to 
represent Socrates as presiding over spiritualistic seances of the 
familiar fraudulent kind at which his favourite follower Chaerephon 
acted the part of the spirits evoked. According to the same play 
(1282) a taste for Socrates was like wearing long hair and carrying 
a thick stick, one of the marks of a pro-Spartan at Athens in the 
middle of the great war. One other vaguer reference we get in the 
Frogs (1492) when the poet falls foul of young folk who neglect the 
playwright's art to sit chattering over crazy hair-splitting problems 
with Socrates — by this time an elderly man of some sixty-four or so. 
We may add to these notices one or two comic fragments of no 
significance which accuse Euripides — an older man by at least ten or 
twelve years — of being inspired by Socrates, and may or may not be 
regarded as evidence in support of the later belief in the personal 
friendship of the two most remarkable intellectuels of the time of the 



6 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

Peloponnesian war. Beyond this, out of all the anecdotes told of 
Socrates by later writers from Aristotle onwards there appears to be 
only one which comes with certainty from a source older than Plato 
or Xenophon. Ion of Chios related in his memoirs that Socrates had 
in his youth visited Samos in company with Archelaus, the successor 
of Anaxagoras, who in the phrase of Diogenes Laertius * translated 
physics from Ionia to Athens \ As Ion also recorded anecdotes of 
his meeting with Sophocles when the poet was one of the generals 
dispatched to put down the revolt of the year 441-40, it is not 
unlikely that his reference to Socrates means that Socrates and 
Archelaus were serving in this campaign. The event would then 
have occurred when Socrates was about thirty, thirteen or fourteen 
years before the birth of Plato, and its remoteness will explain why 
it does not appear among the few necessary absences of Socrates from 
Athens recorded by Plato (Ion ap. Diog. Laert. ii. 22), Thus the 
total information about the philosopher which can be regarded as 
coming certainly from sources earlier than the fourth century and 
independent of the group of much younger admirers whom he left 
behind him at his death is exceedingly scanty and affords no material 
for a real biography or an account of the real nature of his influence. 
He had perhaps served in the campaign against Samos, had been 
reduced to poverty by a time soon after the battle of Delium, and 
apparently not earlier ; he had a curious stare and an odd way of 
rolling in his walk, was a great talker, and associated with persons 
who were supposed to hold ' odd ' spiritistic views, was ' the fashion ' 
with the young iiLoroB-qjioL at the time of the Sicilian adventure, and 
was perhaps a friend of Euripides. That is in sum and substance all 
we know independently of information supplied by men who were at 
least forty years his juniors, and as it will be seen, it does not 
amount to much. For the rest we have only the statements of Plato 
and Xenophon, together with any traditions which can be traced 
back to the 'Socratic men' or to the Pythagoreans with whom 
Aristoxenus had associated, and in the case of the last-named source 
of information we have constantly to face the problem of distinguish- 
ing between the traditions themselves and the malevolent interpreta- 
tions put upon them by our Gewdhrsmann, Aristoxenus. 

There is indeed just one more statement which should perhaps 
be included in this summary. According to Isocrates, Polycrates, 
the sophist who published, a few years after Socrates' death, the 
defamatory pamphlet which perhaps opened the series of writings 
about the philosopher's life and character, declared that Alcibiades 
had been a 'disciple' of Socrates. Isocrates treats this as a gross 



PLATO^S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 7 

and palpable falsehood, thus, as Professor Burnet reminds us, showing 
himself quite in keeping with the representations of Plato, according 
to whom Socrates insisted that he had never followed the profession 
of a teacher, and consequently had never had any * disciples ' 
or * pupils ' at all. That Alcibiades had been a young friend 
of Socrates and influenced by him Isocrates does not, of course, deny. 
(Isocrates xi. 5.)^ 

I come now to consider my more immediate subject — the biography 
of Socrates as we could write it if we took Plato as our exclusive 
source. Properly I mean, of course, the biography which we could 
collect from the Platonic dialogues, but we must not omit from 
consideration the one work in which Plato speaks of Socrates in 
propria persona, the Vllth Platonic Epistle. I do not propose here 
to make any formal defence of the genuineness of this important 
document. It is enough to say that the authenticity of the Platonic 
correspondence — which we must remember was known to Cicero and 
included in the edition of Plato's ^vorks by Aristophanes of Byzantium 
— has been generally allowed by the best critical and historical 
students, Bentley, Cobet, Grote, Eduard Meyer, and only denied by 
writers on philosophy. That is to say, for the letters we have the 
judgement of those who have no preconceived opinion of their own 
as to what the philosopher ought to say in his correspondence, 
against them the judgement of just the persons most likely to be 
biased, thinkers with pet theories of their own about what is or is 
not * Platonic ' in philosophy. And for our particular document we 
have also the verdict of the most important of those w^ho have 
doubted or denied the authenticity of other items in the collection. 
Hence I propose to utilize it freely for my present purpose without 
further discussion.^ 

The letter, if such a name can be given to what is really a public 
or semi-public manifesto, w^as addressed to the Sicilian partisans 
of Dion after his assassination by Callippus and aims at putting 
new heart into a party which had lost its leader by an exposition 
of the fundamental principles for the sake of which Plato had 
intervened in Sicilian politics. Incidentally, to justify his cause and 
exhibit the consistency of his conduct, Plato is led into an autobio- 
graphical retrospect of his earlier life and the way in which he had 
been forced, so far as the public affairs of his own city were concerned, 

^ It is noteworthy that Plato never calls himself a ' disciple '. In the careful 
account of his early years which he sent much later to the partisans of Dion in 
Sicily he calls Socrates simply an ^ elderly friend ' of his own (see pp. 8, 9). 

^ For further discussion of Ep. VI 1 see C. Hitter^ Xeue Untersuchungen iiber 
Platon, c. 7 ; Ilackforth, The Authorship of the Plutonic Epistles, pp. 84. ff. 



8 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

to desist from direct political activity. The main purport of the 
narrative is that his original bent had been that of an active social 
reformer. Twice in life there had seemed to be an opening for such 
a reformer at Athens, on the reconstitution of the city with an 
oligarchical constitution after the final extinction of Periclean 
democratic Imperialism in 404, and again at the restoration of 
the democracy by Thrasybulus and his friends. Plato would have 
been ready to co-operate with either party in a real social reform, but 
had discovered that each was bent on discreditable party ends. In 
both cases what finally disillusioned him was the unworthy treatment 
meted out to Socrates — the best and wisest of living Athenians. 

Of the oligarchy of the thirty he says : ' There was a revolution in 
the existing constitution, which was denounced as faulty on many 
sides. The consequence of this revolution was . . . the establishment 
of a body of thirty irresponsible magistrates. Now some of these men 
were my own connections and relatives, and actually invited me to 
take what might be considered my proper part in that administration. 
My feelings were such as might have been expected in so young 
a man. I supposed their management of affairs would begin with 
a general reversion from an unprincipled to a righteous policy. 
Consequently I observed very carefully how they would proceed. 
But what did I find ? Before long they had made the old constitution 
seem like a golden age. More particularly there was the case of 
Socrates, an elderly friend of mine, whom I may fairly make bold 
to call the most upright man of the time. They despatched him 
and others to arrest a fellow-citizen illegally and bring him to 
execution, hoping to implicate him in their proceedings nolentem 
volentem. Socrates, however, disregarded the order and put his life 
in jeopardy rather than make himself an accomplice in such wicked- 
ness. When I saw this and other grave indications of the same kind, 
I was disgusted and withdrew from the evil of the times." He then 
goes on to add that he would have been equally ready to serve the 
restored democracy, but for their equally reprehensible treatment of 
Socrates. ' Not long after this the thirty and the whole system were 
overthrown, and once more I was attracted, though more slowly, 
to a life of public political action. The new time was, of course, one 
of confusion and much happened which caused natural disgust, and 
it is not surprising that in a revolution there should have been some 
cases of excessive revenges on private enemies. Yet on the whole the 
restored party showed notable forbearance. But unhappily certain 
prominent and influential persons again interfered with my friend 
Socrates and brought him before the courts on a wicked charge of 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 9 

conduct wholly foreign to his character. He was prosecuted con- 
demned and executed for impiety — he who had refused to join in the 
old wicked proceedings in the case of one of their own exiled friends 
at the time of their own exile and ruin.' ^ 

The references throughout this passage are, of course, to the 
incident of the illegal execution of Leon of Salamis, related more 
fully in the Apologia, and thus serve to establish beyond all doubt 
the historical truth of the story told there, as well as incidentally to 
confirm the statement that Socrates, whom Plato is careful to mention 
simply as a friend for whom he had a profound admiration, had no 
regular * disciples '. That this should be the only reminiscence of 
Socrates in a correspondence which belongs to Plato's old age is 
natural enough, since by his own account the affair of Leon was 
an event which changed the whole current of his life. As a young 
man he had aimed at the vocation of a practical statesman. He was 
at first willing to enter public life as a supporter of the government 
of the ' Thirty ' until their attempt to make Socrates an accomplice 
in their breaches of the law opened his eyes to the real character of 
their administration ; later on, he was anxious to serve Athens under 
the revived democratic regime, but was again disillusioned by the 
enmity of Anytus and other persons of influence and position to 
Socrates, — the specially shocking thing about their conduct being, 
apparently, the ingratitude thus shown to a man who had put his 
life in peril rather than commit an illegality against one of the 
democratic partisans when it had been their turn to be under the 
harrow. For it may be noted that Plato's indignation does not lead 
him to deny that Socrates may have done things which would have 
brought him within the scope of the law against so ill-defined an 
offence as do-ipeia, such as * honouring unrecognized divinities'. He 
does not, like Xenophon, maintain that Socrates had, in any case, 
been a model of old-fashioned Athenian piety. What disgusts him 
is that such an accusation should have been laid by the leaders of 
a party for whose friends Socrates had incurred the heaviest risks in 
their own time of misfortune. From the point of view of the 
Athenian law, as Plato of course knew, the moral virtue which 
Socrates had shown in the affair of Leon could be no defence to an 
accusation of acre/Seia. That real 'impiety' is identical with moral 
turpitude is a maxim not from Athenian law but from Plato's o\\n 
philosophy. To borrow an illustration from a later and very different 
revolution, Socrates might well have been a Girondist but would have 
had no truck with the 'Mountain'. We are now in a position to 

» Plato, Ep. VIL 324 c-325 c. 
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10 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

consider the actual statements about Socrates which occur in the 
dialogues. In presenting them to you I shall do my best to make 
my narrative as full as possible, so far as the facts go, and shall also, 
of course, confine myself to statements of biographical fact, to the 
exclusion of expositions of philosophical convictions except where the 
omission would make the biography incomplete. 

Socrates, then, was the son of Sophroniscus and his wife Phaenarete 
and belonged to the tribe Antiochis and the deme Alopecae (for 
Sophroniscus see e.g. Laches 180-1, for Phaenarete, Theaetetus 149 a, 
for the tribe. Apologia 32 b, and for the deme Gorgias 495 d). The 
year of his birth is not specified, but it may be inferred from the fact 
that he is made on the first page of the Apology to speak of himself 
as * more than seventy ' that we are to suppose him born not later than 
470 or the earlier months of 469. As to his social position, we learn 
from the Theaetetus, the only place, except for a passing reference to 
the First Alcihiades^ in which any Socratic man mentions his mother, 
that Phaenarete was a midwife. Her name is suggestive of good 
family connexions, as we see from its appearance in the mock-heroic 
genealogy of the 'immortaP Amphitheus of Aristophanes' Acharnians 
(1. 49). Of Sophroniscus we are told rather more. His name occurs 
more than once in the dialogues, and from the opening pages of the 
Laches we learn that he was a family friend of his fellow demesman 
Lysimachus, the son of the great Aristeides and, according to 
Lysimachus, a man of some consequence and of high character. 
From the jest in Euthyphro 11 c where Socrates speaks of his 
' ancestor ' Daedalus, famous in legend for his skill in making statues 
which could walk about, we see that Sophroniscus must have been 
a member of an hereditary guild of sculptors. Unless we accept the 
First Alcihiades as a genuine work of Plato, this is his one and only 
reference to the calling of Sophroniscus, and unfortunately tells us 
even less about the circumstances of the family than we should learn 
about those of a modern eminent man in his early years from the 
statement that his father was a Free Mason. The general impression, 
however, which Plato's account leaves on us is quite inconsistent with 
the popular conception of Socrates as a genius who rose almost 'from 
the gutter ' and untouched by the influences agitating the * good 
society ' of his age. The remarks of the Laches imply at least that 
Sophroniscus was a man of weight and influence in the aflairs of his 
deme or township, and there is nothing to bear out the view that 
because he belonged to a guild which regarded Daedalus as its 
* ancestor ', he must have been something very much like a working 
stone-mason or bricklayer. And, as we shall see, though with one 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 11 

notable exception the Platonic dialogues prefer to depict Socrates 
either in ripe manhood or advanced age, it is regularly assumed in 
them that he had the entree to the ' best ' society of all kinds, where 
he was admitted by the most eminent men of the time as an equal, 
and that he encountered the most distinguished representatives of 
thouo-ht and letters from the non-Attic Hellenic world on terms 
of perfect equality. In particular it seems clear that we should be 
wrong if we read into Plato the modern notion of Socrates as having 
been all through life hampered by poverty. It is true that Plato 
does depict him as exceedingly poor at the close of his life. He 
makes him say in the Apology that the highest fine he could pay 
would not amount to more than a mina. But we must recollect 
that he also expressly ascribes this poverty to his lifelong devotion to 
a spiritual quest which left him no time to serve tables, and also 
that the close of the Peloponnesian War had been followed by a finan- 
cial collapse in which even the richest had suffered badly. To take 
only two or three familiar instances, the famous wealth of the families 
of Callias the AaAc/coTrXoiroy, and of Nicias vanished in the confusion 
of the year of anarchy, and we find Lysias (xix. 15) dwelling in the 
peculiar tone of pathos appropriate to the law-courts on the straits to 
which Phaedrus of Myrrhinus had been reduced. It is true that we 
begin to hear of Socrates' want of means in the Republic^ where the 
scene is laid somewhere in the early years of the Archidamian war, 
and that the fact of his poverty is treated as notorious by the comic 
poets in the year 423. But, as Professor Burnet reminds us, Socrates 
was still serving as a hoplite the year before 423 a t Delium and the year 
after at Amphipolis, and this means that until then at any rate he was 
decidedly not in any dire poverty. In fact one may reasonably con- 
jecture that he must have suffered some rather sudden and consider- 
able loss between the affair at Delium and the attack of the comic 
poets on him in the following year. Indeed the iteration with which 
Aristophanes returns to this topic is rather difficult to explain if the 
impoverishment of Socrates was not a recent event. There is at any 
rate no reason to suppose that in his early life he was cut off from 
sources of culture by want of means or the need to earn his bread. 
In fact, in the one dialogue in which Plato professes to be dealing 
with the youth of Socrates, the Parmenides, he represents him as 
having as a matter of course free access to the society of one of the 
most prominent men of affairs of the period, Pythodorus son of 
Isolochus, who figures in Thucydides as being in his riper age a person 
of first-rate importance all through the Archidamian war. Given an 
initial reverse after the battle of Delium, when we take into account 

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12 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

the growing financial pressure caused by the failure of the great 
Sicilian expedition, the land-blockade of Athens and the gradual 
destruction of her sea-power in the Decelean war, and the crazy Ter- 
rorism of the ' Thirty \ and remember that for many years at any rate 
before his death Socrates had wholly devoted himself to his spiritual 
* vocation \ we can readily see that no inference can be drawn from 
his poverty in 399 to the wealth and social position of his parents or 
to his own financial position in the first forty years of his career. 
The more reasonable question would be how such a man, after such 
a career, could be so much as able to keep himself supplied with food 
and even in a position to pay a fine of as much as a mina without 
asking for time. And it is clear that in the Apology Socrates means 
to say that he could pay this much down on the spot, since he does 
not supplement the offer, as was customary when an offender could 
not discharge the penalty immediately, by the suggestion of imprison- 
ment until the fine has been paid. 

We may, I think, infer that the Platonic notices are probably 
a sufficient basis for the statements about the family of Socrates 
which we find in the later writers appealed to by Diogenes Laertius ; 
in particular, there appears to be no real evidence that Socrates him- 
self had ever followed statuary or any other craft. Plato's assertions 
about his youth and early manhood at least imply that he had from 
the first abundant leisure to satisfy his passion for ' science ', and the 
late story of the figures of the Graces which were shown to visitors to 
Athens as the work of Socrates prove only that these figures were 
shown in a much later time as such, but nothing more.^ It is also 
worth while to note that Xenophon, who is still regarded in what 
may be called ' official ' quarters as so trustworthy an authority on 
the facts of Socrates' life, never refers to his parentage or names either 
Sophroniscus or Phaenarete, except in the one brief passage in 
Hellenica /, where he refers to the behaviour of Socrates in the affair 
of the trial of the generals who had commanded at Arginusae. There 
he speaks of the philosopher for once as HcoKpccTTj^ Hco^pouiaKov 
'AQrjvalos* In the one other place outside his ' Socratic discourses ' 



* It is true, as Professor Gardner reminds me, that Pausanias appears to have 
seen these statues {Paus. i. 22. 8 ; ix. 35, 2). But in the former passage all that 
he says is thaj; the group was currently ascribed to Socrates (/cat Xdpiras 'ScoKpdTT) 
TToiTJo-ai TOP 2w(l)poviiTKov Xeyova-i), SO that he can hardly be presumed to be speaking 
with certainty on the point. See the full discussion of the point in Frazer, 
Pausanias s Description of Greece, vol. ii, pp. 268-72, where the author comes to 
the conclusion that Socrates certainly did not execute the 'original relief, 
though he admits the possibility that he may have made a copy of it. 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 13 

where he refers to the philosopher — the story in Anabasis iii. 1 of 
Socrates'* disapproval of his connecting himself with the adventure of 
prince Cyrus, he says only * Socrates the Athenian ', evidently pre- 
supposing that the person so described will be too well known to his 
readers to require any further specification. The earliest allusion to 
the craft of Sophroniscus, outside Plato, is, so far as I know, that of 
Timon of Phlius, who calls Socrates a Xid 0^609 (Timon ap. D. L^ 
ii. 19). At the risk of deserting chronological order it may be as 
well to deal at this point with the one other piece of information 
Plato gives us about Socrates' family affairs. As we learn from the 
Phaedo Socrates was married to a lady of the name of Xanthippe, 
who survived him, and had by her three children, two of whom were 
quite young at the time of his death, and the third no more than 
a lad {Apology 34? d). The names of the children are never men- 
tioned by Plato, and here, for once, we are indebted to Xenophon 
for a piece of real information. From him we learn that the name 
of the son who was a ' lad ' at the time of his father's death was 
Lamprocles. (The names of the two younger, Sophroniscus and 
Menexenus may possibly have been mentioned in the dialogue on 
distinguished ancestry ascribed to Aristotle, of which I shall have 
to speak in a moment, or Diogenes Laertius may have got them 
from the third-century biographical writers to whom he also refers 
for his statements about the family of Socrates.) 

It has very properly been observed that both the name Xanthippe 
and the names Lamprocles and Menexenus have a highly aristocratic 
sound. From the opening monologue of Aristophanes' Clouds we 
gather that a name with 'hippos' in it was thought to stamp its 
bearer as of the caste of 'Vere de Vere', and we may remind our- 
selves that the masculine Xanthippus was a name in the famous 
house of the Alcmaeonidae, and was borne by the father of Pericles. 
When I come to say something about the social connexions of 
Socrates, it will, I think, be made clear that Plato's account pre- 
supposes a close relation with the family and immediate circle of 
Pericles himself, and this may have something to do with the name 
of Socrates' wife. It is, as Professor Burnet has pointed out, another 
indication of the social position of Xanthippe that the second, not 
the eldest, son of the family bore the name of the paternal grand- 
father. The name Lamprocles, which obviously belongs to the nomen- 
clature of high society, was presumably bestowed in honour of some 
relative of Xanthippe, — possibly her father. Thus it seems to be 
fairly clear that Socrates, to use the vulgar phrase, ' married above 
him '. I need hardly remind you that the stories of the shrewishness 



U PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

of Xanthippe find no confirmation in Plato. All that he records of 
her is her conduct on the day of Socrates' death which, as he describes 
it, is that of an affectionate woman of ordinary intellectual capacity, 
who can only take in the one thought that she will never see her 
husband again. Nor is there anything in the account to suggest that 
Socrates was indifferent to his wife. Since Xanthippe is said to have 
been ' discovered ' in company with Socrates when his friends were 
admitted early on the morning of his last day, she had presumably 
spent the night before with him in the prison, and his famous instruc- 
tions for her removal appear to be dictated partly by the desire to 
save her from a complete breakdown, partly, as he himself remarks 
later on {Phaedo 117 d), by the correct anticipation that in any case 
the actual scene at his death would be almost intolerably trying to 
the nerves of more than one member of the party. The presence of 
his wife and child would no doubt have made it quite unbearable. 
It must be remembered that there is an interval in the Platonic 
narrative immediately before the execution scene in which Socrates 
has a last interview with his family, so that the pulpit-rhetoric which 
has been spent on making out a contrast between the ' hardness ' of 
Socrates and the affect ionaten ess of Our Lord, who provided for His 
mother in His last moments, is as false to fact as offensive to 
Christian feeling. Xenophon also says nothing to the discredit of 
Xanthippe except that, like many devoted mothers, she had a 
' temperament ' which sometimes called for patience on the part of 
her husband and her son. The source of the popular conception of 
Xanthippe seems to be the anecdotes of her high temper told by 
Diogenes who does not even say where he got them. As he is known 
to have used the gossiping Alexandrian writers Satyrus and Hierony- 
mus of Rhodes, as well as the deliberate slanderer Aristoxenus, they 
presumably have no better authority behind them. 

It may possibly be that the Phaedo throws some light on the 
quaintest of all the traditions of a later age about the family life of 
Socrates. There was a story, which we meet both in Diogenes and 
in Plutarch, according to which Socrates had two wives, Xanthippe 
and Myrto, who is sometimes called a daughter, sometimes a grand- 
daughter of Aristeides the Just. The gossips were undecided 
whether Myrto was the earlier or the later wife, and some of them 
said that Socrates lived with both at once, alleging as an explanation 
a ridiculous story that the Athenians were so badly hit by the 
decrease in population in the later years of the Peloponnesian war 
that they legalized bigamy. The story is told by Aristoxenus, 
Hieronymus and Satyrus, and has usually been dismissed as one of 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 15 

the characteristic rhodomontades of the first-named author.^ But it 
also seems to have been related — so far as the mere ascription of two 
wives to the philosopher goes — in the doubtfully authentic Aristo- 
telian dialogue on Distinguished Ancestry and by Demetrius of 
Phalerum. The authority of Demetrius seems to me too great to 
permit of the simple rejection of the tale as a pure fiction. Hence it 
seems to me not without some significance that according to the 
Phaedo, Socrates at his death left a baby in arms behind him. For 
we are told that when the friends of Socrates arrived at the prison 
they found Xanthippe with her iraiSLou there. The only explanation 
of the presence of the child that is at all natural is that it was a baby 
too young to be left by itself. (According to the Apology Socrates 
left two sons who were then iraiBta, but we hear only of one who 
actually spent the last night in the prison.) This indicates two 
things, the remarkable physical vigour of Socrates, who must have 
begotten the child when he was well on at least towards seventy, and 
the considerable disparity of age between himself and Xanthippe. 
If we bear in mind the age at which a woman of Southern Europe 
ceases to bear children, — Plato fixes it, as you will remember, at 
forty, — we may infer that Xanthippe must in all probability have 
been a good thirty years younger than her husband. As Lamprocles 
is said in the Apology to have been rjSr] fieipaKLOv at the time of his 
father"'s death, it is natural further to suppose that his birth fell in 
the first year or two of Socrates'* married life with Xanthippe. In 

* We have the following versions of the story : — 

D. L. ii. 26. Aristotle says that Socrates married two wives. By the first, 
Xanthippe, he had Lamprocles, the second, Myrto, daughter of Aristeides the Just, 
he married without a dowry, and by her he had Sophroniscus and Menexenus. 
(Chronology, as well as the testimony of Plato, shows the falsehood of this version 
of the tale. Possibly D. L. has quoted ' Aristotle ' wrongly, placing Xanthippe 
first instead of second. But in that case the story becomes inconsistent with the 
account of Xenophon who refers to Xanthippe as notoriously hard to manage in 
his Symposium, and obviously therefore means her and no other to be the mother 
of whose high temper Lamprocles complains in Memorabilia ii. 2. ) 

Plutarch, Aristeides 27. Demetrius of Phalerum, Hieronymus of Rhodes, 
Aristoxenus, and Aristotle — if the dialogue irep'i evyev^Uis is genuine — say that 
Socrates cohabited with Myrto, the granddaughter of Aristeides. He had indeed 
another wife, but took Myrto in addition as she was widowed, and in great poverty. 

Athenaeus xiii. 656 a. Socrates is said by Callisthenes, Demetrius, Aristo- 
xenus to have had two wives, Xanthippe and Myrto a great-granddaughter of 
Aristeides ; Aristotle Trepi (vyev^ias is the common source for the story. 

D. L. ii. 26. ^Some' say that Myrto was the first wife, otliers, including 
Satyrus and Hieronymus, that he was married to both at once. For the 
Athenians, anxious to make good the losses in the male population, made 
a psephism that a man should be legally married to one Athenian woman, but 
beget children by a second also. 



16 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

that case Socrates must have been about fifty at the least when he 
married a wife of probably under twenty. Now in view of the 
regular practice in Greek communities it is hard to believe that 
a man intending to marry at all would have waited until this age to 
do it. Such conduct would be especially surprising in Socrates who 
had if anything a weakness for pluming himself on the fidelity with 
which he conformed to the Novios of his city, and is not likely to 
have forgotten that begetting sons for the city was a universally 
recognized civic duty. (Even the tale which represents him as having 
two wives at once is careful to assert that he takes the second to com- 
ply with the imaginary special law enjoining bigamy — i.e. as a duty 
imposed on him by the State.) Hence it seems to me not improbable 
that, as the data drawn from the Apology and Phaedo suggest, 
Socrates was a widower when he married Xanthippe. In that case, 
in view of the evidence of the Laches for the intimacy of Sophroniscus 
with the family of Aristeides, it would not be at all surprising if 
he was married as a young man to one of its members, as Demetrius 
of Phalerum, and just possibly Aristotle, asserted. The reason why 
we hear nothing of such a first wife in Plato or Xenophon would 
be simply that their knowledge of Socrates of course did not go 
back to his early manhood. As it is, we should not know from 
Plato whether Socrates had ever been married to Xanthippe if it 
had not been necessary to mention her for the purposes of the 
Apology and Phaedo. 

To return from this digression to the main theme of my argument. 
Nothing is recorded by Plato of the early boyhood of Socrates beyond 
the one fact that the famous ' warning voice ' attended him even in 
childhood (e/c iraiBos dp^cc/xepov, Apology 31 d), a fact which has 
an important bearing on Plato's ascription to him in later age of other 
signs of the temperament of a visionary and on Aristophanes'* burlesques 
of him as an occultist. Beyond this we hear no more of him from 
Plato until he is already a man though a * very young one \ when we 
get a glimpse of his special interests from the professedly auto- 
biographical narrative of the Phaedo and again from the introductory 
pages of the Parmenides. Both sketches agree in representing him 
as at that time principally interested in the latest mathematical and 
physical theories of the early science which was just on the verge of 
eclipse by the new light of sophistic humanism. According to the 
Phaedo he was acquainted with and originally an enthusiast about 
' what they call natural science "* (lorropia nepl (pvaecos), but much 
perplexed by the hopeless incompatibility of the results to which 
it had led in different hands. Thus he knew both the Ionian 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 17 

cosmology which assumed a flat earth and the theories of the Italian 
Pythagoreans which required a spherical earth (Phaedo 97 e). and was 
anxious for a true theory of the planetary motions {ib. 98 a) ; he was 
also hesitating between riyal biological theories which we can recognize 
as those of the Ionian type, represented at the time by Archelaus 
and Diogenes of Apollonia, and the Italian, of which the Phaedo 
specifies the doctrines of Alcmaeon of Crotona and Empedocles (96 b), 
and aboye all was specially interested in the problems raised by Zeno 
about the one and the many (Phaedo 97 a). It was presumably at 
this period also that he laid the foundations of the knowledge of 
geometry which Plato consistently ascribes to him in the Meno^ 
Phaedo, Republic and elsewhere, and Xenophon rather admits than 
denies. In particular, as we all know, it was, according to the 
Phaedo at this date that he came under the influence of Anaxao-ora^ 
in whose book he expected, for a time, to find a consistent teleological 
doctrine of astronomy and cosmology, and it was a direct result of 
his disappointment ^vith the failure of Anaxagoras to carry out the 
implications of his own principle that mind is the source of the 
order in the uniyerse, that he, still as a youno; man. resolyed to 
look for truth •' in propositions ' and thought out the method of 
* hypothesis ' and the doctrine of the participation of things in 
Forms. These statements are borne out by the Parmen'ides, where 
we meet Socrates again as a yery youthful man and find him 
expounding this yery doctrine about Forms and ' participation ' to 
Parmenides and Zeno as a recent discoyery of his own {Parm. 130 b 
avTos (TV ovTco SifiprjcraL co^ Xeyeij ; ' did you draw this distinction for 
yourself? '). 

As I am not expounding any theory of the philosophy of Socrates 
in the present paper, it is perhaps more to the point to call attention 
to the presuppositions of the dialogues just mentioned about the 
company in which Socrates was at home thus early in life. The 
Phaedo distinctly presupposes acquaintance with the followers of 
Anaxagoras, who, we must remember, belonged to the Periclean circle, 
as it also implies in another passage knowledge of the eminent 
Pythagorean Philolaus ; the Parmenides shows Socrates to us as an 
habitue of the house of Pythodorus son of Isolochus, whose prominence 
as one of the leading men of aflairs in the regime of the Imperialistic 
democracy is familiar to the readers of Thucydides. It is from his 
acquaintance with Pythodorus that Socrates is brought into contact 
with the Eleatic philosophers, and that the Pythodorus in question 
is the well-known admiral and politician is made certain by the 
statement of the First Alcibiades that Pythodorus son of Isolochus was 

A 5 



18 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

a pupil of Zeno.^ Most of the dialogues depict Socrates at a later 
period of life, but they all agree in representing him as well known 
and highly thought of by the most distinguished society of the 
Periclean democracy. Thus, in the Laches^ dated shortly after the 
battle of Delium, we find Socrates on terms of familiarity with both 
Nicias and Laches and highly thought of by both of them not only 
for his personal courage but for his thorough understanding of 
military professional matters. He is equally familiar, to judge from 
the Protagoras, with the brilliant wits M'ho formed the entourage of 
Callias son of Hipponicus, and grandson of the famous ' millionaire ' 
of the time of the Persian wars ; the Timaeus represents him as 
consorting as an equal with the elder Critias ^ and the rising, though 
not yet fully mature, Syracusan statesman Hermocrates as well as 
with Timaeus himself, who is described as being at the very top 
of the tree in astronomy and having in his past life filled the most 
important offices in his native state, apparently before the overthrow 
of the domination of the Pythagorean order in the cities of Magna 
Graecia.^ It should be specially noted that he is represented as 
persona grata in the houses of men who are typically representative 
of the Periclean regime, such as those of Cephalus, and the family to 
which Plato himself belonged. This would naturally mean that he 
was welcome in the house of Plato's step-father Pyrilampes, whose 
close connexion with Pericles is proved by the malicious allusions of 
the comic poets who represented Pyrilampes as keeping a petite maison 
for Pericles and his misses. Thus, from Plato''s representation, we 
should conclude that Socrates had been on friendly terms with many 
of the most prominent ' Whigs \ as Professor Burnet has called the 
party who, without ceasing to be loyal to the democracy, disapproved 
of the inferior men who guided its fortunes after the death of Pericles. 
Even the notorious friendship for Critias the oligarch probably comes 
under this head, as Critias had always figured as a democrat until his 
moral character was ruined by his entrance into the coterie of the 
' Thirty \ The general effect of Plato's account on my own mind is 
the impression that he wishes us to think of Socrates as being from 
the first a person of a sound social standing, mingling on equal 
terms with the best society of the Periclean regime and devoted 

* Alcibiades I. 119 a. 

^ That Professor Burnet is right in his identification of the Critias of the 
Timaeus should really need no proof. 

' Timaeus 20 a, where every word should be read with attention. Even if we 
could get over the palpable absurdity of supposing that the poems of Solon were the 
' last novelty ' at any time in the life of Critias 6 twv TpiaKovTa, what is said here 
shows that the Critias meant is an old man with a great public career behind him. 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 19 

from a very early age to the pursuit of science, and certainly not, 
after the fashion of some modern writers, as a kind of plebeian and 
illiterate but mysteriously inspired artisan. Hence, though I do 
not wish here to suggest an opinion either way on the genuineness of 
that singular work the Menexenus, I see nothing out of keeping w-ith 
Plato's standing ' hypothesis ' about the manner of life of Socrates in 
the suggestion made there of a personal intimacy with Aspasia and 
consequently with Pericles, The point is not wholly unimportant in 
connexion with the satire of the RejpubJic and Gorgias on the Imperial 
democracy (in the Gorgias it will be remembered the person of 
Pericles is not spared), and the comments of modern expositors on 
the political attitude revealed by these passages. That this almost 
unqualified censure of Athenian democracy is meant by Plato to be 
taken as representing the attitude of Socrates himself seems to me 
quite certain. The passion which breathes through the passages in 
question is wholly absent from books like the Politicus and Laws, 
where another than Socrates discusses the merits and faults of 
democracy. It is directed not ao-ainst democracy in general but 
against the very special form of democracy which Pericles had created, 
a democracy which is primarily commercialized, bent on the capture 
of the world's trade,-^ and, secondarily and by consequence, committed 
to a policy of Imperialistic expansion, and its bitterness is far too 
intense to represent the moral verdict of a thinker looking back on 
a vanished state of things. It is dramatically right only in the mouth 
of a disillusioned brave old man who has lived himself through the 
age he is denouncing, has seen and perhaps once believed in its 
promise and lived to witness its inevitable collapse. It is equally 
clear that this vehement arraignment of the Imperial democracy — and 
indeed of Pericles himself — as wanting in respect of a sound moral 
basis is not meant to be the judgement of an ' outsider ' from the 
lower orders. It is intended as the final pronouncement of one who 
had known the leaders of the movement and thoroughly understood 
their purposes, and found them all, on mature reflection, deficient in 
the one thing needful in a true leader — genuine statesmanship. 

What Plato tells us of the early manhood and prime of Socrates is 
connected with two main topics, his military exploits, and the famous 
utterance of the Delphic oracle which more than anything else formed, 
as Professor Burnet has said, the turning-point in his career. The 
former subject may be dealt with first in a few brief sentences. 
Socrates, for all his mysticism, was not one of the mystics in whom 

* Like the • ImperiaUsm ' (so-called) of our own fiuauciers and commercial 
monopolists, within and without the United Kingdom . 



20 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

transcendental emotion is most regularly aroused by loneliness and 
the contemplation of nature. He and Wordsworth, in spite of some 
marked points of resemblance, are in this respect mystics of radically 
opposed schools, the urban and the rustic. It was not the ' sleep that 
is among the lonely hills' that induced in Socrates the mood of 
interior stillness and reflection of the soul back upon herself, but the 
busy noise and hum of man. Hence, except when on active service 
he was the most home-keeping of townsmen, devoted to the crowded 
streets of Athens with even more than Johnson's devotion to the streets 
of London. The 'trees of the country side' in his own language 
' had nothing to say to him ' ; even a short excursion to the Isthmus 
to see the Games was so contrary to his habits, that it is regarded as 
worth chronicling {Crito 52 b). Apart from this one occasion, he was 
only absent from Athens when his duty as a citizen took him into the 
stricken field. This seems to me more like the peculiarity of an 
actual man than the invention of a dramatic genius imagining 
a fictitious character. It may, of course, be said that the whole 
modern romantic feeling for nature is a thing unknown to the Hellenic 
world, — only we have the choruses of Euripides, Socrates' elder con- 
temporary, to prove the opposite, and in particular the lyrics of the 
Bacchae show us how potent in ancient times, as well as in our own, 
was the association between lonely nature and the spirit of mysticism. 
Yet there is a type of mind, less common than the other and perhaps 
not likely to be imagined by one who has had no actual contact with 
it, in which the roar of traffic, the restless scuffling of the human 
ant-heap and the ' wilderness of bricks and mortar ' are still more 
potent than the silences of nature to make the soul realize her own 
essential solitude and render her apt for the communication of the 
beatific vision. Francis Thompson with his vision of the shining 
' traffic of Jacob's ladder pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross ' 
is an example, and Socrates would seem to have been such another. 
In the Symposium^ when the vision suddenly overmasters him, he is in 
the act of making his way along the streets to a dinner-party of the 
gayest. It is another touch, true enough to our nature, that the 
\ isionary quality goes in him hand-in-hand with the soldierly, as it has 
done with men like Gordon and others. It is from no idle fancy that 
Plato represents the most famous of these *rapts' as taking him when 
he was serving in the trenches before Potidaea. We are meant to feel 
that in the serene courage of Socrates in the face of the foe, of which 
Alcibiades is made to say that it far surpassed that of Laches on the 
disastrous day of Delium, there is just a touch of the unearthly. 
Socrates is strong and daring and above everything else serene in the 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 21 

hour of danger, an ' ideal warrior ', just because, like Galahad, he is at 
heart even more saint than man-at-arms. Plato names three of these 
campaigns, that of Potidaea (431-430), that of Delium (424), and 
that of Amphipolis (422), and presumably these were the only three 
{Ajjology 28 e) of any note, though it is curious that we hear nothing 
of any military service of Socrates after 422. As he would not be 
officially a yepcoi/ exempt from further service until 411, the explana- 
tion may be that during the ten years in question there was no land 
fighting serious enough to demand the calling up of men of advanced 
middle age. Why nothing is said of service in the Archidamian war 
itself except in 431, 424, and 422 is a further question. Possibly 
Socrates may have taken his part in the other years in the defence of 
Attica against the regular annual invasion of the Peloponnesian forces. 
Hence Plato would have no occasion to mention the fact in recording 
the occasions on which his hero left Athenian territory. It is hardly 
credible to me that the philosopher, who was in the very prime of 
physical strength when the war began, should have been called on for 
no military service except in the years specified by Plato. 

As for the details supplied about two of these campaigns, we know 
from the Symposium that what seems to have been Socrates'* principal 
experience of the ' illuminative way ' came to him in the camp before 
Potidaea, on the occasion when he stood in a ' rapt ' rooted to one spot, 
through the whole of a summer day and night. Plato, who puts the 
narrative in the mouth of Alcibiades, further records that Socrates 
showed the highest valour in actual fighting and saved the life of 
Alcibiades, who had been wounded in the engagement. The prize for 
valour was bestowed on Alcibiades, though he himself urged on the 
generals the claims of Socrates, and ascribes their selection of himself 
to a rather unworthy reason — regard for his a^/co/za, i.e. the weight 
which his name carried with the drj/xo?, partly no doubt on account of 
his illustrious birth, and partly because he seemed to be marked out 
as successor to Pericles in the capacity of uncrowned despot of Athens. 
Thus Plato at least wishes us to believe that Socrates was more than 
a mere average good soldier, he was a man who merited what corre- 
sponded to our V. C. and only failed to get the distinction by an act 
of favouritism on the part of the authorities. (For all this see 
Symp. 220 c and e.) In connexion with the famous 'rapt' it is 
worth noting, as I have said elsewhere, that, unless Plato is falling 
into a small anachronism the story implies that the nickname 6 (ppou- 
TiaTT]9, with which Aristophanes makes such play in the Clouds, was 
already commonly given to Socrates as early as 430, for there would 
be no point otherwise in Alcibiades' statement that the ' word went 



S2 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

round that ^onKpdTrjs (ppouTi^cou tl Eo-TrjKe \ We might fairly infer 
from this that Socrates was already known as the head of a school— 
for the (ppovTL(TTr]S implies the (ppovTLo-TrjpLov — at the beginning of the 
Archidamian War, and the evidence of Aristophanes points in the same 
direction as he introduces the (ppouTia-rijpLou as if it was already a well- 
known and familiar institution, not something invented by himself 
and requiring an explanation. But the consideration of this point is 
better deferred for a moment. It is also an excellent touch, which 
many modern editors have done their ignorant best to remove from 
the text, that the persons who showed the chief curiosity about Socrates' 
singular behaviour were * lonians ' — men from the home of purely 
secular science where trances and ecstasies were unfamiliar. Of all 
the mistaken ' emendations ' of the passage the worst is that German 
one which turns the lonians into Paeonians, inhabitants of a region 
where * possession "* must have been too familiar a thing for the ' rapt ' 
of Socrates to cause any special remark. 

The conduct of Socrates in the panicky retreat of the Athenian 
forces from Delium is described for us in two passages of Plato. In 
the Symposium — the imaginary date of which dialogue is some eight 
years after the event, — Alcibiades, speaking of the matter as an 
eye-witness, says that as he retired himself on horseback he fell in 
with Laches and Socrates who were, of course, serving as hoplites, 
that Socrates showed himself much the more self-possessed (e/xcppcou) 
of the pair, bearing himself exactly as Aristophanes had represented 
him as doing in the streets of Athens, and that it was due to his 
coolness that Laches himself, as well as Socrates, came off unhurt 
{Symp. 221 b). A similar account is given by Laches himself in the 
dialogue named after him. Indeed Laches goes further in his com- 
mendation for he says, 'He accompanied me in the flight from Delium, 
and I may tell you that if every one had done his duty as he did, our 
city would never have fallen on that calamity' {Laches 181 b). 
It is notable that, for whatever reason, Xenophon tells us nothing 
whatever about any of these military exploits : for all we learn from 
him Socrates might never have come within sight of a stricken field, 
though one would think a brief reference to the philosopher's deeds as 
a brave and loyal soldier would have been much more valuable in 
a professed apologia for his life than many chapters of the moralizing 
small talk with which Xenophon abounds. Thus Plato is really our 
only authority for the campaigns of Socrates (the one later story 
about them, that he saved the life of Xenophon at Delium is plainly 
only a confused douhlette of what the Symposium says about his rescue 
of Alcibiades before Potidaea, and is shown to be false by the simple 



PLATO^S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 23 

consideration that if Xenophon was old enough to fight at Delium he 
must have been between forty and fifty when he joined the enterprise 
of Cyrus — on^p cctottou, as the mathematicians say). The only really 
consistent position for those who believe Plato to have freely invented 
biographical incidents for the hero of his prose dramas is that of 
the extremely ' vigorous and rigorous ' German critic who has had the 
courage to declare that this military record is from beginning to end 
pure fiction — though what the object of the fiction could be it is not 
easy to say. 

I turn now to the other chief point of interest, — Plato's account of 
the philosophic ' mission ' of Socrates. It is plain that according to 
Plato the turning-point in Socrates' inner life was the deliverance of 
the famous oracle which assured Chaerephon that Socrates was the 
greatest of all the ' wits ' of the age (for that is what aocpcoTaTo? 
means in the language of the Periclean age). As we have seen, 
Plato's account represents Socrates as being in his early manhood an 
enthusiastic student of science and the author of a philosophical 

* hypothesis ' by the help of which both the puzzles raised by the 
doctrine of Anaxagoras and the perplexing mathematical questions 
first brought into clear light by Zeno might be successfully met. 
He is careful to let us know that the greatest men of an earlier 
generation had formed the highest expectations of Socrates' future 
eminence as a philosopher. Such expectations are put into the 
mouth of Parmenides with reference to the promise of Socrates' early 
youth (Parm. 130 e, 135 d) and again into that of Protagoras 
(Protag. 361 e), the context in the latter passage showing quite 
clearly that Protagoras had formed his opinion, which he had 

* already expressed to many persons ', not from the conversation 
reported in the dialogue, but during that first visit to Athens on 
which he had made the acquaintance of Socrates, who figures in the 
dialogue as already quite well known to him. As Professor Burnet 
observes, this visit must have been earlier than the foundation of 
Thurii in 444 b.c, or Protagoras would hardly have been chosen 
by Pericles to assist in drawing up the constitution of so important 
a colony. So that we are taken back again to the early manhood 
of Socrates. And although the imaginary date of the Timaeus is 
shown by the allusions of the Republic to the youth of Polemarchus 
and Lysias — they are both called veavtcrKOL according to the best 
text in Republic 328 d — and by the presence of Cephalus in that 
dialogue — to fall somewhere in the earlier years of the Peloponnesian 
war, when Socrates would be a man of rather over forty — the way 
in which he is accepted as an equal by Timaeus, a Pythagorean of 



24 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

the highest distinction both in science and in politics (Tim. 20 a) 
points in the same direction. The suggestion is that Socrates would 
as he grew to manhood become distinguished as the central and 
dominating figure in a regular school or band of associates devoted 
to the prosecution of science and the higher knowledge in general. 
According to Aristophanes this is just what he was in the year 423, 
with Chaerephon as one of the most devoted members of the coterie. 
Xenophon also knew of the existence of this organization, — which 
according to Aristophanes had not only common scientific pursuits 
but a common table, — for it is clearly they, and not the ' rich and 
leisured young men ' who collected about Socrates in later life from 
pure enjoyment of his talk, whom he means when he speaks of the 
sophist Antiphon as wishing to rob Socrates of his ' associates ' 
{(TvvovaLacrTois). That the ' association ' is that of the central person- 
ality of the school with less advanced students is distinctly implied 
in the comment which Antiphon makes on the unwisdom of not 
charging a fee for the crvpovcTLa {Mem. i. 6. 11), and more than merely 
implied when Socrates in his reply describes himself and his friends 
as in the habit of 'unrolling together the stores of the old wits 
which they have left us in the books they have written' {ib. 14). 
A life of this kind is, in fact, just what Plato makes Parmenides 
or Protagoras prophesy for Socrates, and it is implied by all the 
rules of artistic composition that the prophecy had its fulfilment. 
Thus I .think it plain that Plato wishes us to think of Socrates as 
having been the regular head of an organized school. The natural 
thing, to quote Professor Burnet again, would be that he should succeed 
his own teacher Archelaus as the head of the school founded by 
Anaxagoras. But it is plain, not merely from the character of the 
special doctrines ascribed to Socrates by Plato, but from the promi- 
nence of Pythagoreans like Cebes, Simmias, and Phaedondas among 
the associates who were still connected with Socrates at the time of 
his death, from his friendship with Pythagoreans such as Timaeus, 
Philolaus, Theodorus, and Echecrates, and from the hesitation 
ascribed to him in the Phaedo between the Ionian type of cosmology 
taught by Anaxagoras and the Italian views of which Philolaus 
would probably be the source, that the ' school "" under Socrates must 
have become more than half Pythagoreanized, not to mention that 
the burlesque in the Clouds seems to mean that many of its members, 
including Socrates, practised the ascetic Pythagorean ' rule of life \ 
In Plato, whose dialogues mostly deal with Socrates as a man either 
in the early forties or in advanced life, we naturally do not hear 
much of this side of his activity, and are clearly meant to think of 



PLATO^S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 25 

him as having abandoned the retirement of the study for a general 
mission to preach * attention to the affairs of one's soul ' to the 
Athenian public, though the group of special philosophic associates 
reappear in the Phaedo where we see the old man after his mission 
has been brought to an end by the sentence of the dicastery. As 
we all know, the change which made Socrates into a missionary to 
Athenians at large is said in the Apology to have been due to the 
utterance of the Pythian prophetess. So it becomes important to 
discover, if we can, the date at which Plato assumes this oracle to 
have been given. Of course the significant thing about the whole 
proceeding is not the very obvious answer of the oracle, but the fact 
that the question was asked. I do not know how it may strike any 
one else, but to my mind the very asking of the question by Chaere- 
phon implies that, when he put it to the god, Socrates was not only 
already a man with a considerable reputation as one of the ' wits ^ 
but the recognized president of a society to which Chaerephon 
belonged. Hence the very fact that the sense of the oracle was taken 
by Chaerephon seems to me to indicate that the famous question was 
asked not merely to gratify Chaerephon's personal curiosity but on 
behalf of a body of * associates ' anxious to get the approval of 
a more than human authority for their estimate of their chief. This 
is a point on which every man must decide for himself according to 
his own conceptions of the probable in a matter of human psychology, 
but if my own judgement on the matter is a sound one, it is significant 
that the associates should attach such special importance to the 
verdict of the Pythia. This can hardly be explained by the supposed 
general reverence of the Hellenic world for the oracle at Delphi. At 
Athens the oracle was for sound political reasons an object of sus- 
picious dislike. It * laconised ' as shamelessly throughout the Archi- 
damian and Decelean wars as it had formerly ' medised ' and was 
afterwards to ' philippise \ The real ground for the application to 
Delphi would rather be that the inspirer of the Pythia was Apollo — 
the central divine figure of Pythagorean religion. (To be sure the 
god of Pythagoras was the Delian, and it is at least highly possible 
that Apollo of Delos and Apollo of Delphi were originally distinct 
deities belonging to different peoples, but the sense of the difference 
would be lost long before the time of Chaerephon. The poetic 
legends relating the progress of Apollo westward over Euboea, Attica 
and Boeotia to the already famous shrine of Pytho, where he entered 
as a conqueror, in fact, look like a deliberate attempt to fuse two 
distinct deities into one single figure.) As to the date when the 
oracle was given, a terminus ad qicem may be inferred from comparison 



S6 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

of the Platonic Apology with the Charmides and the Clouds of 
Aristophanes. The Apology tells us that the widespread influence 
of Socrates on the rich and leisured lads, which was one of the excuses 
for his prosecution, arose accidentally out of his self-imposed mission 
of detecting the vain pretences of the different professors of special 
' knowledge ', and that it was the oracle which set him upon this task. 
Of course, as Professor Burnet says, in the Apology Socrates treats 
the business of the oracle with scarcely veiled humour, but even the 
humorous version which he is made to give of its influence on his 
career would be the silliest of jests if the chronological facts about 
his biography did not admit of such a construction. It follows that 
the oracle must have been given, according to the view which Plato 
wishes us to accept, before Socrates had attained his vogue as 
a Mentor of youth. Now the Charmides assumes that he was already 
known in this capacity as early as 430 b. c, for it opens with Socrates' 
own statement that as soon as he returned from his service at Potidaea, 
he at once made for his 'accustomed haunts' — the palaestrae — and 
made inquiries about the condition of ' philosophy and the young 
men ' dui'ing his absence. (Incidentally also, this gives us a date 
about which Plato is not likely to have been mistaken for the begin- 
ning of Socrates' closer acquaintance with Charmides and thus cor- 
rects the absurd statement of later writers that Plato, the near 
relative of Charmides, was twenty years old before he came into 
contact with an eminent man who had been the friend of his uncles 
and cousins before his own birth.) The response of the oracle was 
therefore given before the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, i.e. 
when Socrates was under forty, and the fact that there were at 
that date persons who thought it worth while to ask Apollo whether 
he was not the very foremost of the * wits ' can hardly mean less 
than that he then held a perfectly definite position as the leader 
of a group of largely Pythagorean adherents. We need not, of 
course, suppose that the story of the Apology means that Socrates 
never had any personal influence over any single youth of promise 
before this date. The famous tale of Alcibiades in the Symposium 
expressly lays stress on the point that the admiration of Alcibiades 
for Socrates began when the former was a mere child. This, in 
fact, is the real excuse for the extraordinary methods Alcibiades 
professes to have attempted in his anxiety to gain Socrates' full con- 
fidence and affection. That even a drunken Alcibiades should relate 
what he does of himself is incredible unless we bear in mind that 
' the man can afford to smile at the extravagance of the mere boy '. 
This particular connexion must thus be much earlier than the relation 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 27 

of Socrates to the i^eot in general as an admired Mentor, as is actually 
presupposed by Plato's story. For a relation which began in the 
mere boyhood of Alcibiades must go back to a time well before the 
battle at Potidaea in which Alcibiades was serving in the Athenian 
cavalry. But if even Charmides had not attracted any special notice 
from Socrates until 430 we may be sure that at that time the circle 
of young men and lads who admired him cannot have been a very 
extensive one, though we see from the dialogue {Charm. 153 d) that 
it already included Critias. Of course it must have required some 
time for Socrates to extend his personal influence outside the group 
of lads with whom the friend of Alcibiades would naturally be 
familiar, — such as the connexions of Pericles' intimate Pyrilampes. 
In fact in the Laches it is distinctly implied that the public fame 
of Socrates as a person widely admired among the vioi does not go 
back beyond the years just after the battle at Delium. That battle 
is the latest event alluded to in the dialogue and it is natural to 
suppose from the strength of the impression that Socrates' conduct 
in the retreat has made upon Laches, that we are to assume the 
facts to be quite recent. Yet Lysimachus, the son of the great 
Aristeides, an old friend of Socrates' family, observes (Lach. 180 e) 
that though he had heard a good deal of talk from the ' lads ' about 
a certain Socrates as a wonderful being, it had not yet occurred to 
him that the Socrates of their admiration was the son of his old 
friend Sophroniscus. We are thus plainly to suppose that the 
influence of Socrates on the ' young men of rich and leisured families ' 
began with a connexion with Alcibiades which must go back to some 
time not much later than 440 b.c. (This point is further implied in 
the introductory narrative of the Protagoras, where Socrates and 
Alcibiades are already fast friends at a time when Alcibiades is only 
beginning to show the signs of puberty (Prot. 309 b), and also by 
the tacit assumption in the Symposium narrative that Socrates was 
at the beginning of this friendship still young enough for the roman- 
tic offers of Alcibiades not to be a patent absurdity. The whole 
story is, in fact, thoroughly ill-conceived unless we think of Alci- 
biades as little more than a romantic child just old enough, as he 
says himself, to be allowed to go out alone, and Socrates as still quite 
a young man, at the outside not much over thirty. In the Protagoras 
itself, the date of which must be supposed to be at any rate some 
years before the great war, we find Socrates standing in a rather 
similar relation to his young friend Hippocrates, and before 430, he 
is already on close terms of intimacy with Critias. In 430 he makes 
the closer acquaintance of Charmides, who is then {Charm. 154 b) 



28 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

a fieipaKiov, Early in the war — though the year cannot be fixed — 
we find, as is only natural, that he is a close friend of the step-sons 
of Pyrilampes, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and friendly with two 
* lads ' Polemarchus and Lysias, sons of Cephalus, whom he would 
naturally know, if I am right in the assumption that he was a mem- 
ber of the Periclean circle, from the fact that Cephalus was an impor- 
tant protege of Pericles. But it is not until after 424 that we hear of 
that extensive influence upon which the charge of * corrupting the 
youths ' was ultimately founded. That the very year after Delium 
should have seen the earliest burlesques of the comic poets on him, 
and that Aristophanes should have made him double the character 
of a scientific saint of the Pythagorean type with that of a ' teacher 
of the youths' — (there is, in fact, only a forced connexion between 
his performances as a geometer and hierophant of strange gods and his 
miseducation of Pheidippides) — seems equally to show that his popu- 
larity with the uioL had just been greatly augmented and was a 
novelty to the average Athenian in the year of the Clouds. The 
topical caricaturist does not select for his subject facts which have 
already been familiar for years, and if the comedians with one accord 
fell on Socrates just at a particular time, he must in some way have 
done or suffered something very recently to recommend himself to 
their notice. Hence I think we may infer that Plato means us to 
suppose that at least two of the things made prominent in the Clouds, 
Socrates' poverty and his popularity with young men at large, were 
new things in 423. (The same remark would not apply equally to the 
activities of the cppovrLa-rripLov. They were a more private affair, of 
less interest to the mass of spectators in the theatre, and would hardly 
have served of themselves for the material of a successful comedy.) 

It should, of course, be noted that the construction of the Platonic 
dialogues as a whole conforms to this conception of the life of Socrates 
as exhibiting three successive stages, one in which he appears mainly 
as a student, a second in which his great interest is to bring to naught 
the pretended wisdom of the * wits ', and a third in which he is mainly 
the counsellor of younger men. Thus the Parmenides and the remini- 
scences put into his mouth in the Phaedo belong to the opening of the 
earliest period, the Timaeus and the central books of the Republic 
show us Socrates at a further level of the same development, whereas 
the Protagoras^ the Gorgias, and the first book of the Republic are 
dramatic exhibitions of his power as a critic of ' those who pass for 
wits ' ; in the Charmides, Laches, Euthydemus, Meno, and elsewhere 
he is chiefly the wise and affectionate older adviser of young men of 
promise. But Plato plainly means us to understand that the interests 



PLATO^S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 29 

of one of these ' periods ' could be continued into another. Thus in 
the Timaeiis Socrates listens with absorption to just such speculations 
as those which, according to the Phaedo, had charmed his youth. 
But that dialogue is represented as being held only two days after 
the conversations in the Republic, where Socrates is partly the un- 
masker of the pretender Thrasymachus, partly the guide, philosopher 
and friend of Glaucon, Adeimantus, and the other young folk among 
dramatis personae. Similarly the ecstatic peculiarities of -Socrates 
are said by the Apology to go right back to his earliest youth, but 
we find an intentional stress laid on them in the Symposium, the 
assumed date of which is 416, and the Phaedru^, a conversation 
which must be taken to be held after 416, as it not only criticizes the 
\6yoL of Lysias, thus implying his return from Thurii to Athens, but 
dwells on the rising fame of Isocrates as a writer of \6yoL which dis- 
play a real capacity for philosophy. Just as in the one dialogue 
Socrates, in advanced middle age, can recapture all the ardour of his 
first youthful enthusiasm when he speaks to a fit audience about the 
' fair among ten thousand and altogether lovely ', so in the other, 
the same topic rouses him into a state of ' inspired madness ' at 
a date when he must be thought of as already an official yepcov; 
though he died a man of seventy, we are to suppose, he was none 
the less one of the ' lads who never grow old \^ He does not usually 
speak, when Plato brings him into company with the wise of this 
world or the eager youth of the last quarter of the fifth century, 
of his lover-like devotion to Beauty or of the Forms, but the reason is 
that his audience would not understand, not that he has forgotten ; the 
outbursts of the Symposium and Phaedrus, like the briefer passionate 
utterance of the Republic about the Form of Good which is our spiri- 
tual sun, are reminders which harmonize with the story of the Phaedo 
that in prison, with his public life at a close, the old man's thoughts went 
wholly back to the theory he had devised for himself in the early days 
when he haunted the school of Archelaus and sat at the feet of Zeno. 
Of the outward facts of Socrates' life after the campaign of Amphi- 
polis down to the year of Arginusae Plato cannot be said to tell us 
anything. Probably there was not much to tell. A man over fifty 
was not likely to be called up for what campaigning there was in 
these years, and, according to the repeated assertions of Plato, 
Socrates' * sign ' held him back from active politics. We may sup- 
pose that as the aims of the Athenian democracy w^ere more and more 
revealed as irrational and unscrupulous expansion, empire over every 

' Socrates, too, mig-lit have said with that other immortal youthful yepcov, 
Sir John, ' You that are old consider not the capacities of us that are young.' 



30 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

one and at any price, Socrates' judgement of the Periclean system, 
hard as it had long been (to judge from the language Plato thinks 
appropriate to him in the Republic), became harder. In the Republic 
Imperialistic democracy, though declared the worst system of govern- 
ment short of sheer personal tyranny, is in detail treated in the main 
with a detached humour ; Socrates smiles at its Kcence and jobbery. 
In the Gorgias his language is that of invective, and the name of 
Pericles appears on the list of those false statesmen who had taught 
Athens nothing but folly and wickedness. Yet it is curious, and so 
curious that one feels it must be true, that in the Symposium Alcibiades, 
the very incarnation of the reckless and haughty spirit of the demo- 
cracy, on the very eve of the fatal and final enterprise in which the 
v^pL^ of the * tyrant city ' undid itself, is still the loved personal 
friend of the philosopher, and speaks of the influence Socrates can 
still exercise over his better nature in the strongest terms. It is 
even more singular that in the dialogue which passes the heaviest 
censure on all the democratic ideals and their creators, the Gorgias, 
Socrates definitely declares that whereas the love of Callicles is given 
to the Demos of Athens and the Demos of Pyrilampes (Plato ""s own 
handsome half-brother), his is reserved for 'philosophy and Alcibiades'. 
This is all the more significant that the imaginary date of the con- 
versation seems to be the year after Arginusae, as there is an allusion 
to a recent occasion on which Socrates had ' made himself ridiculous ' 
by not knowing how to put a matter to the vote in the assembly as 
it was his business to do, being one of the prytanes. (As the Apology 
makes it a capital point that Socrates had never held any office 
except that he was a member of the PovXrj at the time of the trials 
of the Arginusae generals, this must be the occasion to which the 
Gorgias refers.) The sentiment about Alcibiades uttered at such 
a time cannot well mean less than that Socrates, like Aristophanes, 
who produced the Frogs in the very year when Socrates was a 
PovXevTTJ?, was prepared to recall Alcibiades on his own terms — which 
is as much as to say that he was ready to see him the real monarch 
of Athens — as the one hope of salvation for the city, a view 
so distasteful to the mass of the SrjfjLos that though the Frogs is 
clearly written principally to urge it, Aristophanes has to pretend 
that his object in the play is to damage the literary reputation of 
Euripides, and to make his real point only at the very end and, as it 
were, by accident. (At least this is how I should explain the singular 
fact that after all that has been said against Euripides' frail heroines, 
his monodies and metrical licences, Euripides and Aeschylus come 
out so evenly balanced on their poetical merits that the decision 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 31 

which of them is to be sent back to the upper world is made, as if 
by a whim of Pluto, to depend on the sudden and unexpected question 
what they think of Alcibiades. Aeschylus is really triumphant, not 
as a better poet — it would be rash to be too sure that even Aristophanes 
himself really thought him so — but because he advises compliance 
with the moods of the * lion's whelp.') 

From the time of the battle of Arginusae on to the weeks which 
saw the actual * Passion ' of Socrates, Plato tells us nothing of his 
doings apart from the two stories of the Apology about the affairs 
of the trial of the generals and of the arbitrary execution of Leon of 
Salamis, and these two stories are only told for the special purpose 
of showing that the philosopher was equally ready to risk his life in 
the cause of righteousness, whether against an angry populace or 
against a little ring of oligarchs. There is no Platonic dialogue 
which seems to assume as its imaginary date any year in this unhappy 
interval, with the probable exception of the Meno, which refers (71 c) 
to a previous meeting between Socrates and Gorgias. As the opening 
lines of the Gorgias (447 a) seem to imply that Socrates is supposed 
in that dialogue to be meeting the famous rhetorician for the first 
time, this may be taken as indicating that the conversation with Meno 
is thought of as subsequent to the interview described in the Gorgias^ 
but there is nothing to show how much later it is supposed to be. 
It cannot be after the departure of Meno from Greece to join the 
campaign of Cyrus. Now Meno, as we learn from the Anabasis, 
reached Cyrus at Colossae in the spring of 401, and we must pre- 
sumably allow some time for the collection of the motley band of 
Highlanders whom he brought with him. Hence we cannot suppose 
the imaginary date of his conversation with Socrates at Athens to be 
later than some time in 402, and it may be earlier. The other point 
to be considered is that Anytus is present at the meeting. As 
Socrates did not retire from Athens with the democrats who withdrew 
to the Peiraeus and other quarters, but remained in Athens through- 
out the anarchy, whereas Anytus went into exile with Thrasybulus, 
we must date the dialogue either before the end of 404 or after the 
amnesty of the following year. Since the violent outbursts of Anytus 
and his solemn warning to Socrates of the danger into which his free 
criticism of democracy and its leaders is likely to bring him are 
clearly meant to be indications of the feeling which led to the philo- 
sopher's prosecution, and since this danger was likely to be a very 
much greater one after the reign of terror and the short civil war 
than before the oligarchy had shown the lengths to which it was 
prepared to go, the latest imaginary date assignable to the dialogue 



32 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

seems to me the most natural. Hence, apart from the dialogues 
which connect themselves with the actual trial and death of Socrates 
(^Apology, Crlto, Euthyphro, Phaedo, Theaetetus, Sophistes, Politicus), 
the Meiio seems to be meant as the latest * imaginary conversation ' 
of Socrates among the Platonic dialogues. So far is it from being, as 
Gomperz fancied, an apology to the Sfj/xos for the free handling of 
democratic statesmen in the Gorgias^ that part of its purpose seems 
to be to show that the leaders of the restored democracy were even 
more intolerant than the oligarchs where philosophy was concerned. 
The oligarchs had attempted to shelter themselves by entrapping the 
iustissimus units of the age into complicity, the restored democrats 
were ready to take his life because he criticized their idols. 

Of the events connected with the actual prosecution and death 
of Socrates, Plato has much to tell us which is too well known for 
repetition here. Only it should be noted that Plato is really the sole 
contemporary who has anything of importance to tell us. From 
Xenophon's Memorabilia (iv. 4 ; iv. 8) we learn that the actual 
prosecutor w^as named Meletus, that Socrates made no previous 
preparations for his speech in his own defence, and (i. 1) that the 
formal accusation was one of religious offences and corrupting the 
youth. We are also told in Bk. i of certain charges of a general 
kind, such as teaching his associates to contemn the existing 'laws 
and usages ' by ridiculing the use of the lot in appointments to office, 
weakening the influence of parents over their children, and saying that 
no kind of occupation is discreditable, and of the more specific and 
rational accusation of being responsible for the offences of Alcibiades 
and Critias ; but these accusations are ascribed so loosely to an unnamed 
' accuser ' that it is not even clear whether Xenophon means they were 
actually urged by the prosecutors or only figured in the pamphlet-war 
about the character of Socrates which was started after his death. 
For the rest the Memorabilia throws no light whatever on either the 
prosecution of Socrates or his death. Even the famous incident of 
the attempted rescue from prison and Socrates' refusal to avail himself 
of it, much though it would have been to the writer s apologetic 
purpose, is not even mentioned. The brief Xenophontic Apologia^ 
it is true, mentions this, but in so obscure and hurried a way 
that we should not know with any certainty what is meant by the 
four words ' when his friends had a mind to steal him away ' {rcou 
eTaipcov iKKXiyp-ai povXo/iii/cou avTou), but for the Crito of Plato, 
which is manifestly the source of the allusion. For the rest the 
contents of the tract are mainly palpable borrowings from the Apology, 
Crito, and Phaedo of Plato, except for two not very happy additions 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES dS 

or corrections. The first of these is the remarkable and comical state- 
ment, alleged to depend on the authority of Socrates' friend Hermogenes, 
that Socrates' object in making a defence which was really a defiance 
was to ensure his own conviction and so escape the weakness and 
disorders attendant on old age — hardly a creditable motive or one 
likely in a man vigorous enough to have left a baby in arms behind 
him. The other is an illuminating example of the author's regard for 
verisimilitude. Apollodorus, obviously the person described in the 
Phaedo as breaking down in the death-scene and nicknamed the 
* softy ' (d fxaXaKos), ' a passionate admirer of the master but otherwise 
a simpleton', says Xenophon, exclaimed,* What I cannot bear, Socrates, 
is the injustice of your execution'. To which it is related that 
Socrates answered, stroking his friend's head, ' Would you rather see 
me executed deservedly ? ' This is, of course, simply a doublette of 
Plato's pathetic little touch about Socrates toying with the curls 
of Phaedo. But which version of the story is the more likely to be 
correct ? In Plato there is a real point to the incident. Phaedo is 
a lad who still wears his hair long, and Socrates accompanies a remark 
that these fine curls will be cut off to-morrow as a sign of mourning 
by a playful gesture meant to help him to imagine his young friend 
as he will look when he has lost his locks. Apollodorus the ' softy ' 
is the narrator in Plato's Symposium, We then learn that he was 
a boy {Symp. 173 a) or rather ' still a boy ' when the famous banquet 
took place in 416. I.e. he was born some years before that date, but 
at the time when he repeats the story he is — as the words imply — 
a man who has been spending some three years in constant and daily 
attendance on Socrates. This implies that Socrates is still alive and 
that, consequently, if the ' softy ' had ever any curls to lose, they had 
all been shorn long before the final scene in the prison. The act of 
Socrates, as represented by Xenophon, is thus pointless, and also has 
no kind of connexion, as the corresponding act in the Phaedo has, 
with the speech which accompanies it. Such an illustration of 
Xenophon's methods may fairly justify us in being highly sceptical 
about any incidents related by him for which we cannot find support 
in the Platonic dialogues which, as I hold, though this is not the 
place to argue the point, he has drawn on very freely in all his 
' Socratic ' writings.^ 

* For the ' three years ' and the long interval hetween the occurrence of the 
banquet in 416 and the recital given by Apollodorus see Sympos. 172 e. For the 
evidence that the nickname of Apollodorus was really 6 fxoKaKos, not as most 
editors give it^ 6 /xai/tfcd?^ see Burnet's text of Sympos. 173 d, and his remarks in 
Lis annotated edition on Phaedo 59 a 9, which seem to me quite conclusive. 
Indeed Xenophon's epithet ei»r}^7;s (Apoloy, 28) strikes mc as an intentional allusion 
to the nickname fxaXaKos, 



34 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

It will be seen, I think, that the result of our examination is that 
Socrates, as he appears in Plato''s dialogues, comes before us as a person 
with a pretty full biography and a career in which we can quite readily 
discern the different stages, and a very definite and strongly marked 
individuality. There are at least five strains combined in his complex 
personality : (1) from his earliest manhood he has been a votary of 
science and a haunter of the circle of the ' wits ' of the Periclean age, 
and it is just his prominence in this character which, by prompting 
the question of Chaerephon to Apollo, has led to his assuming the part, 
so familiar to us, of apostle of the doctrine that virtue is knowledge 
of the good and that this knowledge is the one thing needful ; (2) he 
is a man of immense physical vigour, full of life even at the age of 
threescore years and ten, and has behind him a record of military 
service and shrewdness of judgement in military affairs which is of the 
most distinguished kind and caused his opinion to be valued by 
the military experts of his day ; (3) he is a distinct opponent of 
Periclean ' imperial ' democracy, whose opposition hardens into bitter- 
ness and something like unfairness as he grows older, and the upshot 
of a commercialistic imperialism is more visibly manifest in fact ; 
(4) he is a 'saint' of the Orphic type, and an illumine, a seer of 
visions and subject to 'rapts'; (5) and yet, unlike the mystics of all 
but the first order, he is kept sane throughout by that sense of humour 
and the due proportion of things which his enemies mistake for a mere 
sly pretence, and call his ' irony '. It is this, before anything else, 
which makes him a sweeter and saner Hellenic prototype of our own 
Carlyle. Carlyle, in fact, is in many respects a kind of Socrates 
manqite, driven by failure to exercise the gift of seeing things in their 
right proportion, and above all by failure to exercise 'irony' upon 
himself, into alternations of high-flown raptures about the eternities 
and immensities with moods of that unqualified pessimism w^hich the 
Phaedo calls ^ misology '. A good deal more might be inferred if it 
were part of my purpose, as it is not, to take into account what Plato 
tells us about the doctrines of the man and the known philosophical 
leanings of the group whom both Plato and Xenophon name for us as 
his life-long ' comrades '. But, as I have already said, it is Plato's 
account of the life and personality of his hero, not his statements 
about his views on science and philosophy, which is my topic this 
afternoon. The question at issue is just this, whether such a character 
and such a biography impress us as a vivid and dramatically true 
reproduction of a living original, or as the free invention of an artist 
anxious to draw an imaginary picture of an ideal sage. My own 
thesis is that on the second supposition it is unintelligible why Plato 
should have imagined such a host of small biographical details and 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 35 

succeeded in imagining them so well that, though they are scattered 
through a long series of works the composition of which, as no one 
denies, must have ranged over the best part of half a century, there 
are no discrepancies to be detected, and again that the peculiar 
combination of marked personal characteristics is most unlikely to 
have been thought by Plato or any one else necessary to the character 
of a typical and ideal wise man, and is therefore only explicable on 
the supposition that what Plato has given us is a brilliant reproduction 
of an actual original who was ' an original * in the colloquial, as well 
as in other senses, of that word. You may test the soundness of this 
conclusion, if you wish, very simply. If we want to know how Plato, 
in the full maturity of his powers, imagined the * philosophic ' type, 
he has given us the opportunity to do so. The * Eleatic stranger ' of 
the Sophistes and Politicits is actually introduced to us in the opening 
sentences of the former dialogue as an excellent sample of the type, 
and, as he is anonymous, Plato is not compelled to adjust the por- 
traiture to the known biography or personal peculiarities of any one. 
This personage is far from being like Berkeley's Hylas or Hume's 
Cleanthes a mere figure-head, a mouthpiece for a theory propounded 
for discussion, and nothing more. As any attentive reader will per- 
ceive he has a real individual manner of his own — but it is hard 
to imagine any figure less like the Socrates whom we find sibi constans 
from his youth as described in the Phaedo and Pai'menides to his 
prime in the Republic^ his middle age in the Symposium and his death 
in the Phaedo, To me the theory that we are dealing in these 
dialogues with a type or an imaginary figure sounds as wild and 
unnatural as it would be to maintain e.g. that Whistler's portrait 
of Carlyle w^as meant to represent the painter's notion of a typical 
man of letters, or that Pope had no actual contemporary before his 
mind Avhen he sketched the character of ' Atticus '. 

As a brief pendant to what has gone before, and by way of comment 
on the dogma which still persists in our own country, that it is from 
Xenophon we must collect the facts about Socrates, I may subjoin 
a brief statement of the strictly biographical facts or unfacts recorded 
by Xenophon. None of them, it will be observed, definitely include 
anything in the way of biography belonging to the earlier period of 
Socrates' life which might not have been directly copied from the 
Platonic dialogues which were indubitably used for Xenophon's 
Apologia^ as Xenophon himself all but tells us in the opening 
sentences of the work. Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus 
(Hellenica i. 7. 15); he had a son who was called Lamprocles, and 
a wife, with a temper of her own, whose name, Xanthippe, is once 
occasionally given in the Xenophontic Syvijjoslum (ii. 10). 



36 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

A list of his * associates ' is given which seems to be taken direct 
from the Phaedo, only that Chaerephon, who died before the trial 
of Socrates, as we learn from Plato, is added. Further, he was a 
friend of Callias, son of Hipponicus (mentioned as the host of 
Protagoras in the dialogue Protagoras), of Glaucon, Plato, Charmides, 
and, though Xenophon wishes us to think this connexion temporary, 
of Alcibiades and Critias, whom he sought in vain to correct of their 
faults of self-will and hatred of discipline. He was well versed in the 
higher mathematics and astronomy of his time (Mem. iv. 7. 3 and 5), 
though he did not think such knowledge of practical service for most 
men. He was exceptionally punctilious in performing the ceremonies 
required by the religion of the state, and 'practised' more than 
mankind in general in the way of offering prayer and sacrifice on 
his own account. He believed in oracles and prognostications in 
dreams, and regarded his own peculiar ' sign ' as a kind of oracle 
private to himself. But when we ask for something more definite 
than these generalities in the way of biography, the Memorabilia 
furnish us with remarkably little. We learn {Mem. i. 1), as we are 
also told in the Hellenica^ that Socrates was eTriaTaTr]^, or chairman 
for the sitting of the assembly in which the proposal to deal with the 
Arginusae generals en bloc was made, and that he refused to put the 
proposal to the vote. (This is related without the further details given 
by Plato in the Apology.) That in the oligarchic reign of terror Critias 
and Charicles, fearing his censures of their proceedings, forbade him 
to converse with the young, and that Socrates, under a show of defer- 
ence to their authority, * chaffed ' them about the absurdity of such 
a vague prohibition, but was dismissed with a threat. Whether he 
obeyed the order we are not told. That Antiphon the sophist, at 
some unspecified time, tried to draw away the companions with whom 
Socrates was accustomed to study the writings of the * wits of old \ 
That Socrates admired the apologue of the 'choice of Heracles'*, 
which had been worked up into a show-declamation by Prodicus. 
That he once tried hard to make up a quarrel between Chaerephon 
and his brother Chaerecrates. That he advised a friend who had lost 
his means of support in the year of anarchy to set his women-folk at 
remunerative work. That he found for the wealthy Crito a useful 
factotum to protect him from blackmailers. That he prevented 
Plato's brother Glaucon from making himself ridiculous by trying to 
cut a figure before the eKKXrjo-ia while he was still in his teens. This, 
says Xenophon, he did from friendship to Charmides and Plato, 
where the mention of Plato must be an inadvertence, since the 
Glaucon of the Republic is already a young man who has distinguished 
himself in battle, and a fast friend of Socrates at a date when Plato 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 37 

must have been a baby, though the statement about Charmides would 
fit in well with Plato's account that Socrates was attracted to him as 
early as 430, if it were not for one allusion which seems to show that 
Xenophon is thinking of the incident as happening during the 
Decelean war {Mem. iii. 6. 15).^ This is quite incompatible with the 
assumptions of the Republic in which Glaucon is said to have dis- 
tinguished himself in a battle at Megara fought at a date when 
Cephalus the father of Lysias was still alive, and Lysias himself a 
mere ueauicrKO?. 

It is a more interesting point, and one which might help to 
explain some things in Socrates' later life that Xenophon says it was 
he who first persuaded Charmides to enter politics (Mem, iii. 7. 1), 
but when we find that the arguments of Socrates are made to 
turn mainly on the value of self-knowledge as a preparation for 
public life we are forcibly reminded of the discussion of self-know- 
ledge in Plato's Charmides, and we have also to ask ourselves at what 
date the advice can have been given. It is definitely stated that 
Charmides, who was only just old enough to be called ^leipaKiov 
in 430 {Charm. 154 b), was an avrjp d^ioXoyos when Socrates urged 
him to shake off his shyness, and that Socrates had been struck by 
the sound advice he had been known to give in private to ' those who 
are employed in the state's affairs ' {Mem, iii. 7. 3). Clearly, then, 
we are to think of him as at any rate a man of some thirty years or 
more. This brings us down to so late a date that it is incredible 
that the facts should not have been remembered by the democrats 
who prosecuted Socrates and have been a much more plausible charge 
against him than most of the matters which seem to have been 
brought up at his trial, since Charmides was at the head of the 
oligarchical Committee set up in 404 to administer the Peiraeus, and 
with Critias fell in battle against the majority of his fellow-citizens. 
Yet from Xenophon's own silence it appears that no one had made 
it a grievance against Socrates that he had actually persuaded the 
man to take up public life ! Hence I fear the incident is probably 
nothing more than a pleasing story founded on the charming Platonic 
description of Socrates' interest in Charmides as a youth. Thus the 
Memorabilia are wholly silent about most of the characteristic facts 
of the life of Socrates, as related by Plato, before the year of 
Arginusae, and add nothing fresh of a biographical kind except the 
story that Critias and Charicles tried to restrain his sarcastic com- 

^ Glaucon complains that his uncle (i. e. Charmides) cannot be persuaded to 
entrust the management of his affairs to him. Charmides is thus thought of as 
a full-grown man of position at the time when Socrates first caroe into contact 
with Glaucon. 



38 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

merits on their administration, (the much more important incident of 
the arrest of Leon is not mentioned), and the representation of his 
wife, who is not named, as a woman with a temperament. 

From the Symposium, which purports to be an account of a gathering 
in the year 422, we might gather that Socrates was on friendly terms 
with the millionaire Callias (as we know from Plato), that his wife's 
name was Xanthippe, that he used to dance, as Hobbes used to sing, 
in strict privacy for bodily exercise, that he jestingly professed to be 
proud of his skill as a pimp and go-between between ' wits ' and the 
pupils by whom they made a living (an idea which seems to be taken 
directly from Plato''s Theaetetus) and of his personal attractions. (Here 
again we seem to have a clumsy development of a theme from the speech 
of Alcibiades in the Symposium of Plato, a work to which Xenophon 
makes constant and undisguised allusions throughout his own piece.) 
Further that, just after the production of the Clouds, be it remem- 
bered, there was a popular jest that he was a (ppovTia-Trf^, who 
studied ' the things aloft', and a joke of some kind about his studying 
geometrical problems turning on some point about a flea, and that 
he spoke eloquently about the difference between the heavenly and 
the earthly Aphrodite (again a palpable reminiscence of the speech 
of Pausanias in Plato's Symposium), I have not taken into account the 
rival possibility that it is Plato's dialogue which borrows touches from 
Xenophon, partly because I do not think any reader of the two 
works, unaware that such a theory has been mooted, could possibly 
doubt on which side the indebtedness lies, but partly because I hold 
that the question can be settled if necessary by a single case in which 
Xenophon's language is unintelligible except as an allusion to Plato's 
work. In Xenophon ii. 26 Socrates is made to apologize for a vivid 
metaphor by saying, Lva Kal kyoo kv Topyuiois prjfMaa-Lv eiTrco, 'if I too 
may use the high-flown language of Gorgias.' No one in the preceding 
part of the work has used any TopyUia pr\p.(na at all ; everything has 
been said in the simplest language of every day. The ' I too ' must 
therefore allude to something in a composition against which Xenophon 
is pitting his own. He means — though the statement is quaintly 
untrue — that he, no less than some other, can make his characters 
talk the dithyrambic language of Gorgias when he sees fit. If he 
usually makes them speak like men of this world, it is from choice, 
not of necessity. Against whom the attack is directed is seen at once 
from a comparison with Plato's Symposium 198 b, where Socrates says 
that the high-flown speech of Agathon, to which he had just listened, 
reminds him of Gorgias, and pretends to be unable to keep the oratory, 
now that it has come to his turn to make his panegyric of Eros, at 
this magnificent level. 



PLATO'S BIOGRAPHY OF SOCRATES 39 

Xenophon's Symposium thus contributes no single fact to the 
biography of Socrates, though it is interesting as giving a picture 
of his outward appearance and his social manner which, so far as 
it goes, justifies the burlesque of Aristophanes and shows that the 
writer cannot have thought the brilliant portrait of Plato's Sympo- 
sium a pure invention of the imagination. The Apologia^ apart from 
the points for which it has been cited already, mentions the famous 
response of the Delphic oracle (§ 14) as a matter which Socrates had 
spoken of in his defence before the dicasts, but makes him treat it 
quite out of character. He boasts and brags in a fashion which 
would have been certain to secure his condemnation and is quite out 
of keeping with the modesty he elsewhere observes in Xenophon's 
writings no less than with the keen sense of humour ascribed to him 
by Plato. He is also made (§ 20) to profess, contrary to the tenor 
of his whole life, to be a * specialist ' in education {tovto yap laaa-iv 
ipol jiepeX-qKOs), much in the fashion in which Protagoras makes the 
same claim in Plato. Presumably Xenophon thought this kind of 
thing in keeping with the peyaXij-yopia, the * lofty tone ' which he 
professes to have found in ' all previous narratives ' of the trial and 
death of Socrates, — that is to say, if he had chosen to be more out- 
spoken, — in the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. Of genuinely bio- 
graphical information the little tract is wholly empty. 

Finally, we have, of course, in the Anabasis the one really valuable 
addition to the information supplied by Plato, that Socrates (iii, 1, 
5-7) doubted the wisdom of Xenophon's volunteering for the expedi- 
tion of Cyrus and sent him to Delphi to consult the oracle, obviously 
in the hope that he might change his mind. 

If we omit the merely anecdotal from this recital, we are left with 
the following statements : Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, had a wife 
called Xanthippe and a son Lamprocles ; he exercised a good deal of 
influence over Charmides and some temporary influence on Alcibiades 
and Critias. At some unknown date the Delphic oracle told Chaere- 
phon that he was a model of all the virtues. He had some advanced 
knowledge of science and also claimed to have a peculiar private 
oracle. He belonged to a circle which studied the writings of the 
* older wits \ In 422 it was a popular jest that he had propounded 
a geometrical problem somehow connected with fleas. In the year of 
Arginusae he presided over the assembly in which it was proposed to 
try all the generals together and refused to put this proposition to 
the vote. In the oligarchic anarchy of 404 he remained in the city 
but was reprimanded by Critias and Charicles for the imprudence of 
his sarcasms about their administrative methods. In 402 or very 
early in 401 he disapproved of Xenophon's Asiatic adventure. He 



40 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

was put to death after a long life on the charges of religious offences 
and of having a bad influence upon younger men. In all this only the 
name of Lamprocles, the reference to the joke about the flea, the 
story of the reprimand by the Thirty and the personal anecdote 
about his advice to Xenophon himself add anything to the statements 
of Plato. It is obvious that Xenophon has really furnished us with 
no materials from which to make a story of his hero's life. The only 
datable biographical events of any importance, beyond the mention of 
a name or two, belong to the last six or seven years of Socrates' career. 
(The reference to the response of the oracle is undated, and it is not 
from Xenophon that we obtain the materials for fixing its approxi- 
mate date.) There is nothing whatever to show us under what 
influences Socrates had grown up, except a list of his friends from 
which — again not by any help affbrded by Xenophon but by com- 
parison with Plato — we can infer that some of the most intimate of 
them were Pythagoreans. If we compare these meagre results with 
the pretty full and careful account of Socrates, his family, and his 
history already deduced from the dialogues of Plato, we are driven 
to the conclusion that if Plato's narrative is dismissed as imaginative 
fiction, not only the doctrines of Socrates but the events of his life, 
except for one or two which occurred after he was 65, are shrouded 
in impenetrable mystery. * Socrates the man ' — to speak after the 
fashion of the modern writer of ' personal paragraphs ' — is as much 
an * unknown X ' to us as ' the Socratic philosophy \ On the other 
side, if we may trust Plato's accounts we have, I maintain, not only, as 
Professor Burnet, myself, and others have contended, a coherent exposi- 
tion of a philosophical theory of high originality, obviously intended 
to meet j ust the problems which were perplexing Athenian minds in 
the middle of the fifth century, the time of Socrates' early manhood, 
but also a rather full and particular narrative of the life and personal 
traits of the man who devised this philosophy : the account is con- 
tained in a whole series of works written at intervals during a period 
of probably at least forty years, yet no serious discrepancies are to be 
found in it, even when we try it by the severe standard of demand 
for truth not only in casual statements on points of fact but in the 
inferences which result from combination of such casual statements. 
Is it necessary to put into words the only conclusion to which all the 
facts point ? The ' historical Socrates ', as he has been called, must 
be found in the full and faithful portrait, drawn with careful atten- 
tion to fact, of a great thinker by another great thinker who, by 
God's grace, was also a master of dramatic portraiture. The portrait 
is that of the actual son of Sophroniscus ; nearly every ' historical ' 
touch in it is known to us ultimately only on the faith of Plato. 



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